I read an article on Lifehacker about 10 must-have Ubuntu utilities. One of the things on the list was XGL/Compiz, which utterly amazed me. I suggest you check out the video of it here (AVI download). It’s got amazing effects, sort of like Mac OSX Leopard and Vista combined, and then with added twists (and I mean twists literally, haha). I had to give it a try. I currently had Ubuntu installed on my test machine, but only the server version (which didn’t include the GUI). It was also severely broken after I combined testing and stable packages into the same repository… not a good idea. I had to re-install. Unfortunately, my CD drive wasn’t working to well. It barely worked. In fact, I had to eject the drive tray just to let the computer boot. And by the time the system was up, the drive’s tray would forget how to go back in, so I had to manually push it in (the gears wouldn’t finish the job as usual when you pushed it in). That being said, yesterday it actually did work… or at least I thought.

I got to the install screen, and even started installing. Unfortunately, at 72% of the way through installing it,Â it froze because the CD-ROM drive refused to continue reading. What a bummer. Luckily, I had Debian 3.1 (Sarge) installed on the same machine already. I used that, and did a dist-upgrade to Debian Etch (Testing), which let me try out XGL/Compiz. It was very fun, but had some bugs. I wanted the full experience, so I would need to install Ubuntu Dapper Drake some way and follow the above guide. My first impression was to spend a whole day hacking a PXE network install of Ubuntu, but then I remembered I still have my old CD-ROM drive lying around (that was replaced by the Plextor CD-RW that was currently in the machine). So, I would kill two birds with one stone… put in a working drive capable of installing Ubuntu without any hacks or confusion, and I would also rid myself of the annoyance of remembering to eject the CD drive every time I boot the computer.

Then the idea hit me. Why would I content myself with simply replacing the drive and throwing the Plextor in the garbage? It didn’t even deserve to be in a dumpster… it needed to be DESTROYED. So, that is what I did. I dropped it off my sun roof (three stories up), but after that yielded disappointing results I smashed it with a hammer until it was in a million little pieces. Check out the photos of the whole thing right here.